Did Adam Sandler Accidentally Kill the Boys-Only Summer Blockbuster?

Pixels was always going to be a boy movie. In the rigorously gendered world of toys—and the movies that inspire them or are based on them—movies about video games and blocky colorful characters are going to be marketed toward boys (no matter how many women are actually into video games), and the princesses and pink stuff will be for girls. Add in star Adam Sandler, reigning king of the overgrown man-boy, and Pixels becomes a boy movie for all ages, a celebration of the kind of adventure you can have when no girls are allowed in the tree house.

Except neither girls nor boys wanted in on the Pixels tree house this weekend—the would-be summertime tentpole made just $24 million over the weekend, coming in second to holdover Ant-Man. There are plenty of reasons for Pixels to underperform, from Sandler’s gradually dimming star power to lingering fear from the movie-theater shooting in Louisiana. But in a summer when the best, most successful blockbusters have featured righteous female characters right alongside the men, is it possible that the boys-only vibe of Pixels encouraged everyone to stay home?

There are token women in Pixels, as there are in nearly every expensive movie, most notably in the largely humorless military character played by Michelle Monaghan, whose reward for being the most competent person in the film is a make out with Sandler. But Monaghan, who has plenty of experience being excellent in thankless roles, may as well be Katniss Everdeen compared with the treatment of most of the other women in the film. Particularly two—one of them, bizarrely, Martha Stewart—who have zero lines of dialogue but still wind up having sex with one of the male leads.

The Martha cameo, coming at the very end of the film and part of an implied three-way between Serena Williams and Peter Dinklage’s egomaniacal gamer character, is irritating, but at least short. It’s especially galling, though, coming after a series of truly abysmal scenes, in which Josh Gad—another one of the expert gamers saving the world—battles and eventually wins the heart of a video-game warrior woman come to life. Played by Ashley Benson and identified only as Lady Lisa, the character is the ultimate video-game sex object: hot and fierce and completely mute. She fights, she kisses, she even marries Gad in a post-credits scene, yet never has a line of dialogue. The fact that the version of Lady Lisa that marries Gad is in fact a transformed version of Q*bert (seriously, don’t ask) just adds an extra weird wrinkle on a so-called romance that never should have been put on-screen.

Two more women—Williams, who gets in a good joke or two, and Jane Krakowski, playing President Kevin James’s blankly supportive wife—have virtually no lines but wind up seduced by a male lead anyway. Only Lainie Kazan, in a tiny role as the Gad character’s grandmother, is a woman in the film for any reason other than to make eyes at one of the men. And again, none of this is exactly surprising—great actresses from Kathy Bates to Salma Hayek have been gracelessly shoved to the side in Sandler vehicles. But it’s rare to see any film, much less a PG-13 one for broad audiences, present a woman as a sex object as blatant as Lady Lisa, a fantasy who falls into a man’s arms without so much as a word; even the girl from Weird Science was allowed to express thoughts and feelings. Who would have guessed a movie based on 80s throwback video games could wind up more sexist than 80s movies themselves?

Recent PG-rated successes Frozen, The Lego Movie, and Inside Out have, perhaps not coincidentally, eroded the traditional divide between “girl movie” and “boy movie”; boys will see movies about princesses and feelings and girls will see movies about blocky toys when they’re actually worth watching. By rejecting the retrograde sexism of Pixels—whether or not they knew it was there—moviegoers have gone one step further toward dismantling that hoary old divide. In his failure, Sandler may have done as much for feminism in this banner summer as Furiosa, Black Widow, and Amy Schumer.